After the Murder of the Poet and Journalist’s Son, a Call to the Nation’s Citizenry to Come Out into the Streets on Wednesday

By Javier Sicilia
Translated from Proceso by Narco News (originally published in Narco News)

April 4, 2011

The brutal assassination of my son, Juan Francisco, of Julio César Romero Jaime, of Luis Antonio Romero Jaime, and of Gabriel Anejo Escalera, is added to so many other boys and girls who have been assassinated just the same throughout the country, not only because of the war unleashed by the government of Calderón against organized crime, but also the rotting of the heart that has been wrought by the poorly labeled political class and the criminal class, which has broken its own codes of honor.

I do not wish, in this letter, to speak with you about the virtues of my son, which were immense, nor of those of the other boys that I saw flourish at his side, studying, playing, loving, growing, to serve, like so many other boys, this country that you all have shamed. Speaking of that doesn’t serve for anything more than to move what already moves the heart of the citizenry to indignation. Neither do I wish to talk about the pain of my family and the families of each one of the boys who were destroyed. There are not words for this pain. Only poetry can come close to it, and you do not know about poetry. What I do wish to say to you today from these mutilated lives, from the pain that has not name because it is fruit of something that does not belong in nature – the death of a child is always unnatural and that’s why it has no name: I don’t know if it is orphan or widow, but it is simply and painfully nothing – from these, I repeat, mutilated lives, from this suffering, from the indignation that these deaths have provoked, it is simply that we have had it up to here.

We have had it up to here with you, politicians – and when I say politicians I do not refer to any in particular, but, rather, a good part of you, including those who make up the political parties – because in your fight for power you have shamed the fabric of the nation. Because in middle of this badly proposed, badly made, badly led war, of this war that has put the country in a state of emergency, you have been incapable – due to your cruelties, your fights, your miserable screaming, your struggle for power – of creating the consensus that the nation needs to find the unity without which this country will not be able to escape. We have had it up to here because the corruption of the judicial institutions generates the complicity with crime and the impunity to commit it, because in the middle of that corruption that demonstrates the failure of the State, each citizen of this country has been reduced to what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben called, using a Greek word, “zoe”: an unprotected life, the life of an animal, of a being that can be violated, kidnapped, molested and assassinated with impunity. We have had it up to here because you only have imagination for violence, for weapons, for insults and, with that, a profound scorn for education, culture, and opportunities for honorable work, which is what good nations do. We have had it up to here because your short imagination is permitting that our kids, our children, are not only assassinated, but, later, criminalized, made falsely guilty to satisfy that imagination. We have had it up to here because others of our children, due to the absence of a good government plan, do not have opportunities to educate themselves, to find dignified work and spit out onto the sidelines become possible recruits for organized crime and violence. We have had it up to here because the citizenry has lost confidence in its governors, its police, its Army, and is afraid and in pain. We have had it up to here because the only thing that matters to you, beyond an impotent power that only serves to administrate disgrace, is money, the fomentation of rivalry, of your damn “competition,” and of unmeasured consumption which are other names of the violence.

As for you, the criminals, we have had it up to here with your violence, with your loss of honor, your cruelty and senselessness.
In days of old you had codes of honor. You were not so cruel in your paybacks and you did not touch the citizens nor their families. Now you do not distinguish. Your violence already can’t be named because, like the pain and suffering that you provoke, it has no name nor sense. You have lost even the dignity to kill. You have become cowards like the miserable Nazi sonderkommandos who kill children, boys, girls, women men and elders without any human sense. We have had it up to here because your violence as become infrahuman – not animal, as animals do not do what you do – but subhuman, demonic, imbecilic. We have had it up to here because in your taste for power and enrichment you humiliate our children and destroy them, producing fear and fright.

It is you, “señores” politicians, and you, “señores” criminals – in quotes because this epithet is given only to honorable people – are with your omissions, your fights and your actions, making the nation vile. The death of my son Juan Francisco has lifted up solidarity and a cry of indignation – that my family and I appreciate from the depth of our hearts – from the citizenry, and from the media. That indignation comes back anew to put in our ears the phrase that Martí directed at those who govern: “If you can’t, then resign.” Putting this back in our ears – after the thousands of anonymous and not anonymous cadavers that we have at our backs, which is to say, of so many innocents assassinated and debased – this phrase must be accompanied by large citizen mobilizations that obligate you, at these moments of national emergency, to unite to create an agenda that unites the nation and believes in a state of real governability. The citizen networks of the state of Morelos are calling for a national march on Wednesday, April 6, that will leave at 5 p.m. from the monument of the Dove of Peace to the Government Palace, demanding justice and peace. If the citizenry does not unite in this and constantly reproduce it in all cities, in all towns and regions of the country, if we are not capable of obligating you, “señores” politicians, to govern with justice and dignity, and you, “señores” criminals, to retake your codes of honor and limit your savagery, the spiral this violence has generated will bring us on a path of horror without return. If you, “señores” politicians do not govern well and do not take seriously that we live in a state of national emergency that requires your unity, and you, “señores” criminals, do not limit your actions, you will end up winning and having power but you will govern and reign over a mountain of ossuaries and of beings that are beaten and destroyed in their souls, a dream that none of us envy.

There is no life, Albert Camus wrote, without persuasion and without peace, and the history of Mexico today only knows intimidation, suffering, distrust and the fear that one day another son or daughter of another family will be debased and massacred. You only know what you are ask us, that death, as is already happening today, becomes an affair of statistics and administration and which we should all get used to it.

Because we do not want this, next Wednesday we will go out into the street: because we do not want one more child, one more son, assassinated, the citizen networks of Morelos are calling for national citizen unity that we must maintain alive to break the fear and isolation that the incapacity of you, “señores” politicians, and the cruelty of you, “señores” criminals, want us to put in our bodies and souls.

I remember, in this sense, some verses by Bertholt Brecht, when the horror of Nazism, which is to say, the horror of the installation of crime in the daily life of a nation, appeared: “One day they came for the blacks, and I said nothing. Another day they came for the Jews, and I said nothing. One day they came for me (or for a son of mine) and I had nothing to say.” Today, after so many crimes supported, when the destroyed body of my son and his friends has brought the citizenry to mobilize anew, and in the media we must speak with our bodies, with our walk, with our cry of indignation, so that those verses of Brecht are not made a reality in our country.

Additionally, I opine that we must return dignity to this nation.

(Translator’s Note: The term “we have had it up to here” really doesn’t sufficiently capture the indignant depth of the original Spanish, “estamos hasta la madre,” which literally translates as “we have had it up to the mother.” But since that won’t be well understood in English, I used “had it up to here” instead. As always, we welcome readers to suggest a better way to translate it. Additionally, I extend our maximum solidarity as journalists, poets and human beings to our colleague Javier Sicilia, his family, and the families and friends of the young men who were assassinated outside of Cuernavaca last weekend, and applaud his courage and selflessness at a moment when most people in such pain would, understandably, not have the strength to do the service he is doing for all the people of Mexico and the world. – Al Giordano)

NP: Check the narco news wesbite for the original letter in español.

University for Strategic Optimism First Conference:

http://universityforstrategicoptimism.wordpress.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Gcl8nGRXyuM

Simon Critchley is one of the most influential philosophers living today. That’s right, philosophers still exist! Critchley has written books on literature, poetry, death, humor, and the history of philosophy, and he is renowned for his groundbreaking ethical reading of the deconstructionist movement (that’s an important thing, even if you have no idea what it means). He teaches at the New School for Social Research and he is chief philosopher of the International Necronautical Society, a death-obsessed group whose first dictum is that “death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonize and, eventually, inhabit.” Excellent.

Critchley’s philosophy seems to begin in disappointment, both religious and political, and his 2007 book Infinitely Demanding lays out his radical solution to the ever-undulating morass of ethics. That should be the second book of his that you read.

The first should be the New York Times best-selling Book of Dead Philosophers. This hilarious and informative volume, which is totally readable by the philoso-layperson, details the deaths of tons of prominent thinkers while also telling us a bit about each of their approaches to life. It’s choice bedside reading. You learn a little bit, and then you fall asleep and dream about Socrates chugging hemlock in Plato’s cave while Sartre makes shadow figures on the wall using his hands and Foucault’s dick.

Let’s speak with Simon about matters of life and death.

Vice: In a sense, your philosophy proceeds from a statement of pessimism, disappointment, and nihilism.

Simon Critchley: Yes. Nihilism is the obvious response to the death of God, by which we mean the collapse of any transcendent basis for morality, the collapse of the value of everything. Just to say “Well, God is dead” in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the affirmation of meaninglessness.

Makes sense.

At least, that’s my conception of it. It is something that happens historically with the collapse of religion and the end of belief in the infallibility of leaders and so forth.

There seems to be a larger shift away from what we have conceived of as nihilism. Now we’re in an age of ambivalence, with no belief, rather than a vociferous belief in nothing. It seems that the question of meaning is not answered yes or no, but not asked at all.

It’s complicated. On the one hand we’re killer apes, and on the other hand we have this metaphysical longing. We want there to be a significance to human life, and we want there to be a narrative that holds everything together. Nihilism is the moment when we feel that’s been punctured. This is one element in youth culture that is persistent—a rejection of the old gods. You find it in punk, in the cult of death of musical figures. There are many examples. Meaning evaporates, and we feel abandoned. The idea of nihilism hits you, and that can be a dispiriting experience.

Definitely.

It can be one of passive withdrawal, like, “Nothing means anything, so I’ll go to my corner and cultivate myself.” Or it can be more like, “Nothing means anything—I’ll join together with a few others, meet in secret, and start blowing things up.” This is active nihilism. The idea that we live in a meaningless world can be another way of describing capitalism. Capitalism is meaningless, therefore we have to go out and destroy it.

I like the way you think. But do we even get that far?

Well, no. We are not even consumerist; we are a society of distraction, idle talk, and ambiguity. Everybody knows everything has happened, everything is automatically trivial, and, again, nothing means anything. This is the world of blogging, the fake world of Facebook, the world that compensates for an absent set of social experiences. There are virtues to social-networking sites, I’m sure, but you feel an awful vacuum at the heart of them. They compensate for something that is absent. It’s strange, one of the features of the contemporary world is a lack of attention. The world floats, it distracts us in endless ways, one is outside of oneself in a constantly divided attention, and you can multiply the force of distraction, which makes conversation harder and harder as an experience.

Something that strikes me as being very dark is people creating accounts on social-networking sites for their babies and young children so they can use them as soon as they are able. Over the course of their whole life, everyone they ever meet, their entire mood history, is electronically recorded and presented.

Is it an instrument of liberation or discipline or control? I remember the extraordinary enthusiasm for the internet, but now it is a surveillance-work tool, or a social-work tool. What one dreams of is escaping that. The 90s ideas of cyberreality seem preposterous now. We design more and more elaborate means of captivity for ourselves. The idea of voluntary servitude—and you can find this in Montaigne—is that ideology is not something that is imposed on us. It is something that we impose on ourselves. We gleefully make ourselves captive to it in order to fill up all those loose gaps of experience where something else might happen. People construct perfectly seamless lives of distraction where any real encounter is increasingly hard. The most radical thing to do would be to completely disconnect.

Though you begin from an acceptance of the fact that nihilism, pessimism, disappointment, and boredom are prevalent in our existence, you never seem to lapse into irony. Humor seems very important to you, but never irony.

Absolutely. Irony is corrosive. But it also depends on what you mean by “irony.” There’s a classical conception of irony in the German Romantics that is fascinating. It’s about the distance from the absolute, and you find it in Kierkegaard and so on. But by “irony” we usually mean an idea that one does not take things seriously absolutely, a knowingness, a smirking knowingness, which means one can never be surprised by anything, because one always already knows what the thing means, because you know it’s a sham. It’s what drives conspiracy theories, which are a strange form of irony in which you know already what’s driving things.

Right.

The culture of irony is the culture of postmodernism, which I would furiously want to denounce. We have to act ethically and politically. Irony is a defensive position, against reality. It always knows what to think about reality. The idea of commitment and engagement is central to me, which is not ironic.

And humor?

Humor is opposed to irony. Humor is an operation you exercise upon yourself, laughter is laughter at yourself. So that ironic smirking self is undermined by humor, called into question by it. Humor is critical of the ironic position. I understand why people are ironic, I get it, but I think it’s corrosive and limited.

You can understand someone like Czeslaw Milosz denouncing irony a few decades after World War II, but the sense of nihilism, of isolation and alienation, is now so prevalent as a means of dealing with the absurd demands of living. Isn’t it hard to see how or why one would build an alternative?

The idea is, I suppose, that irony is a response to a world that feels distant from us and that is not engaged with us, but it’s a world that remains one that we know all about and so we can step back from it and watch reality television, knowingly. It entertains you, sure, but you’re not engaged. One lives at a distance. There’s a floating distraction in the contemporary world, life at a distance enabled by technology. I want people to commit at the level of their subjectivity. The idea of subjective commitment is at the core of ethics, something that divides the self from itself. I become an ethical self. I cannot meet that ideal, I cannot fulfill it, it divides me from myself and it makes me strive harder. This ideal subjective ethical drive is at the heart of an absolutely earnest, radical politics that insists that people will be able to engage with each other, and they’re lifted from irony at that point.

And we should posit this purely for ourselves? It’s an individual thing?

Absolutely. We live in a world outside of our control, a media universe outside of our control. We have a weak sense of the self. I’m trying to counter that. The most corrosive thing about irony in relation to social experience is that it can corrode your relationships with other people.

How?

It can lead you to no longer see others as human beings but instead as worthy victims of a kind of reality television, of the pornographic violence at the heart of a lot contemporary culture. That offends me. Ethics is about a subjective ethical commitment to a particular other and how one meets that challenge. That’s the core of ethics.

It seems hard to know how to enact this in one’s daily life.

A key question is: How does one behave? One commits to a demand, some demand. It can be a demand for justice, equality, the good. That demand is something that structures what it means to be a self, but it can never be fulfilled in my view. The capacity for forgiveness has to be infinite. The core of ethical experience is the experience of an infinite demand that motivates my behavior.

But we all sort of remain tied to the specter of religion in Western culture. Isn’t it difficult to imagine a complete shift?

I remain optimistic. At the moment, the recession, crisis—there are opportunities. We are living through a very interesting moment. Especially in New York, maybe more so in Britain, where one in five people is connected with the financial industry. The bubble has popped, and everything is at stake, and it’s a real opportunity to be taken. Not to sound apocalyptic, but I think that there’s a genuine possibility of considerable social disorder, if it were properly channeled. It might not be—it might end up being expressed in terms of mass ethnic conflict, hatred against immigrants, foreigners, etc. I’m really watching carefully for what is happening in Eastern Europe. It’s going to be interesting how those countries react after the lie they were sold, especially in regard to the EU, and in countries like France, Germany, Italy, where there’s a tradition of resistance and opposition. I think governments are quietly terrified. There’s massive unemployment, a recession they don’t know how to deal with, and the measures they’ve taken are not working yet, and maybe they’re not going to work. There’s a prospect of significant social disorder.

How would you like to see that come to life?

Personally, I have an anarchist predilection in politics. I think human beings, if they’re allowed to break free of state law and the police, would be able to operate on the basis of cooperation and mutual aid. I think human beings have an essential capacity for goodness that is not allowed to express itself for social and historical reasons. There’s a conspiracy of stupidity and wickedness that corrodes people. The anarchist in me says if those structures were placed in question then something more powerful could emerge. What I’d like to see is a genuine end to the nation-state, an end to all those old structures. I’d like to see genuinely federalist politics—small units, towns, and cities. We’re stuck within Western Europe with a generally 16th- or 17th-century worldview—the nation-state. One might think one has gone beyond that with the EU, but that’s not the case. So the recession could have very interesting consequences. History shows in moments of genuine social crisis, usually something big happens. Also terrible things could happen. They could start to kill Jews, start to murder immigrants. That could also happen.

Mortality is a consistent presence in your work. You state rather unreservedly that death should play a larger part in people’s lives.

Philosophy is the art of dying. Part of that is the distracted floating attention, which is a part of contemporary life that Sartre would call a counterfeit eternity. We’re mortal, and that mortality has to structure our existence and the pleasures and pains that accompany our existence.

I’m getting scared now.

It’s finite, it’s going to end. The minute one grasps that, everything changes. Philosophy is an activity that has always been concerned with how one seizes hold of one’s mortality, and I see myself continuing a very ancient tradition that goes back to Socrates and Epicurus, which is that to be a philosopher is to try and learn how to die. In learning how to die, one learns how to live.

Doesn’t death feel further from our lives now than it did in the times of the ancient philosophers?

That’s part of this dreadful social picture that we inhabit. We are isolated from death, we are insulated from it, and we don’t see it—even with the death of family members. We don’t see the corpse. It’s obscene, it’s shuffled away into hospices and nursing homes, and we don’t see it close up in an experience of war. We see it on television in a way that is distant as well. It would be a very good thing for people to see a corpse once or twice in their early life to see what that means. One of the great cultures that celebrates this most powerfully is Mexico. Mexico has this powerful understanding of mortality. It’s not simply Catholic; it’s much more complicated than that. The skeleton is the national symbol. But the United States is a society based on the denial of death, where everyone is going to live forever. And that just isn’t true.

Literature and poetry blend with all your work, even the most technical philosophy. Do you conceive a central place for literature and poetry in people’s lives?

Absolutely. It has the highest importance. Pasternak said that poetry is one of the enlargements of life. For me, philosophy is something I do because I’m not really a writer. If I had the ability I would have been a poet or a novelist, but I don’t, so I do this. So for me philosophy has always been an acknowledgement of failure. The people I genuinely admire are the people who can really write, who can really open up a world.

Well, it’s an optimistic picture you paint—this place of literature, poetry, and art exalting us to an infinite ethics and an active political anarchism. But it’s hard to marry that with the reality of feelings of futility and aimlessness.

It is. Very much so. Everything is stacked against it, and history is probably going to be written by the people with the guns. But it doesn’t take much to resist. It just takes two or three people meeting and deciding to do something. So I remain stubbornly optimistic. I basically think wickedness is a social and historical outcome. It’s something that human beings have done to themselves through mechanisms like the state, the police, and the law. Human beings are capable of so much more if they’d only let themselves imagine that possibility, and that’s what art and literature and philosophy can do. They can provide ways of imagination that can shake you and allow you to shift from sleep and boredom into something else.

The tearful eye, the noisy spirit is not enough, my friends,

let’s go today to the bazaar in chains’

let’s go with hands waving, intoxicated, dancing,

We are the ones who have to be murdered again, my friends.

Canalising a river
Grafting a fruit tree
Educating a person
Transforming a state
These are instances of fruitful criticism
And at the same time instances of art.

Bertolt Brecht